What a great topic-- thanks, Gnarly. Before we leave the topic of how athletic scholarships are handed out and to whom, I'd like to note that the Ivy League does without athletic scholarships altogether. Any Ivy scholarship is for just that -- scholarship -- and is not dependent on how a student's athletic career may play out over time or who is coaching. Radical, eh?

purple haze wrote:What a great topic-- thanks, Gnarly. Before we leave the topic of how athletic scholarships are handed out and to whom, I'd like to note that the Ivy League does without athletic scholarships altogether. Any Ivy scholarship is for just that -- scholarship -- and is not dependent on how a student's athletic career may play out over time or who is coaching. Radical, eh?

Well, OK, but most of the Ivy's provide scholarships for everyone, and you can jump the que a bit if your grades aren't the absolute top. It CAN help with admissions.

At Harvard, for example, there were more applications from people with perfect board scores than there were slots, and not all people admitted have perfect scores.So it's your athletics and other talents that makes the difference.

On the other hand, a player on academic scholarship can just quit, if the athletics don't work out and still keep the scholarship.

I highly recommend a book entitled "The Price of Admission," by Daniel Golden, a WSJ writer. It documents the roles that non-academic work has in elite college admissions. The stories he reports vary from school to school (Brown recruits the children of celebrities, half the Harvard class is legacies, Duke actively recruits children of potential large donors, etc.), but are invariably interesting and well documented. The bottom line is that there are very few schools that play strictly by the academic high road. (He cites Cal Tech, but there are other examples.)

Another highly recommended book is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which discusses among other things, how things like random chance and birthdate can affect both the opportunity to attend certain schools, and discusses just how important an education from one of those places is to achieve excellence (not very).

Also your last name. There was a study a few years back about a highly selective school in the Czech Republic at which the probability of admission, controlling for all the credentials in the file, was 2% higher for applicants at the beginning of the alphabet (when the admission officers were fresh) than those at the end.

SoreKnees wrote:Also your last name. There was a study a few years back about a highly selective school in the Czech Republic at which the probability of admission, controlling for all the credentials in the file, was 2% higher for applicants at the beginning of the alphabet (when the admission officers were fresh) than those at the end.

I've enhanced my work from before to include all D1 teams and theirrecruiting class size along with the size of the Sr, JR, SO, and FRclasses from their 2008 roster. At the end of each conference are theaverages for the conference. Since many have not posted their signees,I used what was on the committements spreadsheet that you can findeither on BS or the 3rd page of PN postings. Also, in my first columnis who has posted their 2009 schedule on their website. have a look...

Gnarly, FSU lost 5 girls from last years squad, the roster was updated at the first of the year, something not many schools do. Katrin Schmidt, Sarah Wagenfuhr and Erika Sutton all graduated. Sanna Talonen used up her eligibility and Annie Stalzer retired due to injuries. Besides all that just add 3 to the FSU senior column.